Mars Ringtones

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Link: Mars Ringtones [NASA.gov]

 

 

World Premiere:

 

Music from Mars

 

Created exclusively for the virtual NASA@SC20 research exhibit, in collaboration with a team of scientists and musicologists, we present some ethereal ringtones to celebrate scientific results from NASA’s Mars Insight mission, enabled by NASA’s Pleiades supercomputer.

 

Researchers Domenico Vicinanza at Anglia Ruskin University and GEANT, Cambridge, UK, and Genevieve Williams at the University of Exeter, UK, teamed up with professional flutist Alyssa Schwartz at Fairmont State University, West Virginia, to create the ringtones. For the alert tone, the researchers converted the number of available CPUs on Pleiades (224,508 at the time of writing) to a sequence of music intervals (2nd, 2nd, 4th, 5th, unison, octave) to create a melody fragment short enough for an alert. The melody is played on the flute and harp.

 

The ringtones are based on Mars weather forecasts from detailed computer simulations. The research team used an imaging tracking system, based on work by NASA scientist Melinda Kahre to study the movement of cloud formation on Mars and filtering based on nonlinear dynamics to extract regularities and patterns. Mapping those patterns to music intervals, the team created melodies arranged for flute and harp—playing the shape of Mars clouds in motion, as predicted by results run on Pleiades.